A noise behind him. Jack whirled. Scar-lip stood at the edge of the clearing, Hank’s arm dangling from its three-fingered right hand. The rakosh held it casually, like a lollipop. The upper half of the arm had been stripped of its flesh; pink bone dragged in the sand.
Jack lit the tail on the cocktail and moved to where he could straddle the duffel bag. He pulled out a second bottle and lit it from the first. His heart was turning in overdrive, his lungs pumping to keep up. He knew from past encounters how powerful these creatures were, how quick and agile in spite of their mass. But he also knew that all he had to do was hit it with one of these flaming babies and it would all be over.
With as little warning and as little wind-up as he dared, he tossed the one in his right hand, saw the rakosh duck left, threw the other left-handed to try to catch it on the run. Both missed. The first landed in an explosion of flame, but the second skidded on the sand and lay there intact, its fuse dead, smothered. As the rakosh shied away from the flames, Jack pulled out a third cocktail. He had just lit the fuse when he sensed something hurtling toward him through the air, close. Too close. He ducked but not soon enough. The twirling remnant of Hank’s arm hit him square in the face. As he sprawled back, he felt the third cocktail slip from his fingers. He turned and dove and rolled. He was clear when it exploded, but he kept rolling because it had landed on his duffel bag. He was back by Hank’s body when the other three went up.
As soon as the initial explosion of flame subsided, Scar-lip charged across the clearing. Jack was still on his back in the sand. Instinct prompted his hand toward the Semmerling but he knew bullets were useless. Instead he reached for the iron spear, swung it around so the butt was in the dirt and the point aimed toward the onrushing rakosh. Jack’s mind flashed back to his apartment rooftop last summer when Scar-lip’s mother was trying to kill him, when he had run her through. That had only slowed her then, but this was iron. Maybe this time . . .
He steadied the point and braced for the impact.
The impact came, but not the one he’d expected. In one fluid motion, Scar-lip swerved and batted the spear aside, grabbed the shaft and tossed it into the pines. Jack was left flat on his back with a slavering, three-hundred pound inhuman killing machine towering over him. He tried to roll to his feet but the rakosh caught him with its foot and pinned him to the sand. Jack struggled to slip free but Scar-lip increased the pressure until Jack thought his ribs would cave in. He popped the Semmerling into is hand—useless, but all he had left. And no way was he going out with a fully loaded pistol. As he stopped struggling and readied to fire, the pressure from the foot eased. He lay still and it let up completely, although the foot remained on his chest.
Jack looked up at Scar-lip and met the creature’s yellow eyes. It gave one more thrust against his chest with its foot, then backed off a couple of steps.
Slowly, hesitantly, Jack sat up. Was this some sort of game?
But rakoshi didn’t play games. They killed and ate and killed again.
Scar-lip backed off another step and pointed down the trail Jack had come.
No. This couldn’t be. It was letting him go. Why? Because Jack had stopped Bondy from tormenting it? Not possible. Rakoshi knew nothing about fair play, about debts or gratitude. Those were human emotions and –
Then Jack remembered that Scar-lip was part human. Kusum had been its father. It carried some of Kusum in it.
Jack got to his feet and edged toward the trail, always keeping his face toward the rakosh, unable to quite believe this, afraid that if he turned his back on the creature it would strike. Much as he hated to leave the rakosh alive and free here in the wild, he didn’t see that he had much choice. He’d been beaten. The foot on the chest had signaled that. He had no weapons left, and he was certainly no match one on one.
So it was time to go. He took to the trail. One last look over his shoulder before the pines and brush obscured the clearing showed the rakosh standing alone on the sand, surveying its new domain.
Jack got lost on the way out. The trail forked here and there and he couldn’t be sure of the sun’s position through the cloud cover. His release by Scar-lip had left him bewildered and a little dazed, neither of which had helped his concentration. But the extra hour of walking gave him time to think about his next move. He felt an obligation to let people know that there was something very dangerous prowling the Pine Barrens. He couldn’t go public with the story, and who’d believe him anyway?
He heard voices up ahead and hurried toward them. The brush opened up and he found himself facing a worn two-lane blacktop. A couple of Jeep Cherokees were parked on the shoulder. Four men, thirty to forty in age, were busily loading their shotguns, slipping into their day-glo orange vests. Their equipment was expensive, top of the line. Their weapons were Remingtons and Berettas. Gentlemen sportsmen, out for the kill.
Jack asked which way to the Parkway and they pointed off to the left. A guy with a dainty goatee gave him a disdainful up-and-down.
“You could get killed walking through the woods like that, my friend,” he said. “It’s deer season. Someone might pop you if you aren’t wearing colors.”
“I’ll be sticking to the road from here on,” Jack said. He hesitated. He felt he owed these guys a warning. “Maybe you fellows ought to think twice about going in there today.”
“Shit,” said a skinny one with glasses. “You’re not one of those animal rights creeps are you?”
The air suddenly bristled with hostility.
“I’m not any kind of creep, pal,” Jack said through his teeth and took faint satisfaction in seeing the skinny guy step back and tighten his grip on his shotgun. “I’m just telling you that there’s something real mean in there.”
“Like what?” said the goatee, grinning. “The Jersey Devil?”
“No. But it’s not some defenseless herbivore that’s going to lay down and die when you empty a couple of shells at it. You’re not the top of the food chain in there, guys.”
“We can handle it,” said the skinny one.
“Really?” Jack said. “When did you ever hunt something that posed the slightest threat to you? I’m warning you, there’s something in there that fights back and I doubt any of your type can handle that.”
“What’s this?” said the third hunter. “A new tactic? Scare us off with spook stories? It won’t work.”
The fourth hunter hefted a shiny new Remington over-under.
“The Jersey Devil! I want one! Wouldn’t that be some head to hang over the fireplace?”
As they laughed and slapped each other high fives, Jack shrugged and walked away. He’d tried.
Hunting season. He had to smile. Scar-lip’s presence in the Pine Barrens gave the term a new twist. He wondered how these mighty hunters would react when they learned that the season was open on them.
And he wondered if there was any truth to those old tales of the Jersey Devil. Probably hadn’t been a real Jersey Devil before. But there was now.
THE BARRENS
1. In Search of a Devil
I shot my answering machine today. Took out the old twelve gauge my father left me, and blew it to pieces. A silly, futile gesture, I know, but it illustrates my present state of mind, I think.
And it felt good. If not for an answering machine, my life would be completely different now. I would have missed Jonathan Creighton’s call. I’d be less wise but far, far happier. And I’d still have some semblance of order and meaning in my life.
He left an innocent enough message:
“The office of Kathleen McKelston and Associates! Sounds like big business! How’s it going, Mac? This is John Creighton calling. I’m going to be in the area later this week and I’d like to see you. Lunch or dinner—whatever’s better. Give me a buzz.” And he left a number with a 212 area code.
So simple, so forthright, giving no hint of where it would lead.
You work your way through life day by day, learning how to play the game, carving out y
our niche, making a place for yourself. You have some good luck, some bad luck, sometimes you make your own luck, and along the way you begin to think that you’ve figured out some of the answers—not all of them, of course, but enough to make you feel that you’ve learned something, that you’ve got a handle on life and just might be able to get a decent ride out of it. You start to think you’re in control. Then along comes someone like Jonathan Creighton and he smashes everything. Not just your plans, your hopes, your dreams, but everything, up to and including your sense of what is real and what is not.
I’d heard nothing from or about him since college, and had thought of him only occasionally until that day in early August when he called my office. Intrigued, I returned his call and set a date for lunch.
That was my first mistake. If I’d had the slightest inkling of where that simple lunch with an old college lover would lead, I’d have slammed down the phone and fled to Europe, or the Orient, anywhere where Jonathan Creighton wasn’t.
We’d met at a freshmen mixer at Rutgers University back in the sixties. Maybe we each picked up subliminal cues—we called them “vibes” in those days—that told us we shared a rural upbringing. We didn’t dress like it, act like it, or feel like it, but we were a couple of Jersey hicks. I came from the Pemberton area, Jon came from another rural zone, but in North Jersey, near a place called Gilead. Despite that link, we were polar opposites in most other ways. I’m still amazed we hit it off. I was career-oriented while Jon was . . . well, he was a flake. He earned the name Crazy Creighton and he lived up to it every day. He never stayed with one thing long enough to allow anyone to pin him down. Always on to the Next New Thing before the crowd had tuned into it, always into the exotic and esoteric. Looking for the Truth, he’d say.
And as so often happens with people who are incompatible in so many ways, we found each other irresistible and fell madly in love.
Sophomore year we found an apartment off campus and moved in together. It was my first affair, and not at all a tranquil one. I read the strange books he’d find and I kept up with his strange hours, but I put my foot down when it came to the Pickman prints. There was something deeply disturbing about those paintings that went beyond their gruesome subject matter. Jon didn’t fight me on it. He just smiled sadly in his condescending way, as if disappointed that I had missed the point, and rolled them up and put them away.
The thing that kept us together—at least for the year we were together—was our devotion to personal autonomy. We spent weeks of nights talking about how we had to take complete control of our own lives, and brainstorming how we were going to go about it. It seems so silly now, but that was the sixties, and we really discussed those sorts of things back then.
We lasted sophomore year and then we fell apart. It might have gone on longer if Creighton hadn’t got in with the druggies. That was the path toward loss of all autonomy as far as I was concerned, but Creighton said you can’t be free until you know what’s real. And if drugs might reveal the Truth, he had to try them. Which was hippie bullshit as far as I was concerned. After that, we rarely ran into each other. He wound up living alone off campus in his senior year. Somehow he managed to graduate, with a degree in anthropology, and that was the last I’d heard of him.
But that doesn’t mean he hadn’t left his mark.
I suppose I’m what you might call a feminist. I don’t belong to NOW and I don’t march in the streets, but I don’t let anyone leave footprints on my back simply because I’m a woman. I believe in myself and I guess I owe some of that to Jonathan Creighton. He always treated me as an equal. He never made an issue of it—it was simply implicit in his attitude that I was intelligent, competent, worthy of respect, able to stand on my own. It helped shape me. And I’ll always revere him for that.
Lunch. I chose Rosario’s on the Point Pleasant Beach side of the Manasquan Inlet, not so much for its food as for the view. Creighton was late and that didn’t terribly surprise me. I didn’t mind. I sipped a chablis spritzer and watched the party boats roll in from their half-day runs of bottom fishing. Then a voice with echoes of familiarity broke through my thoughts.
“Well, Mac, I see you haven’t changed much.”
I turned and was shocked at what I saw. I barely recognized Creighton. He’d always been thin to the point of emaciation. Could the plump, bearded, almost cherubic figure standing before me now be—?
“Jon? Is that you?”
“The one and only,” he said and spread his arms.
We embraced briefly, then took our seats in a booth by the window. As he squeezed into the far side of the table, he called the waitress over and pointed to my glass.
“Two Lites for me and another of those for her.”
At first glance I’d thought that Creighton’s extra poundage made him look healthy for the first time in his life. His hair was still thick and dark brown, but despite his round, rosy cheeks, his eyes were sunken and too bright. He seemed jovial but I sensed a grim undertone. I wondered if he was still into drugs.
“Almost a quarter century since we were together,” he said. “Hard to believe it’s been that long. The years look as if they’ve been kind to you.”
As far as looks go, I suppose that’s true. I don’t dye my hair, so there’s a little gray tucked in with the red. But I’ve always had a young face. I don’t wear makeup—with my high coloring and freckles, I don’t need it.
“And you.”
Which wasn’t actually true. His open shirt collar was frayed and looked as if this might be the third time he’d worn it since it was last washed. His tweed sport coat was worn at the elbows and a good two sizes too small for him.
We spent the drinks, appetizers, and most of the entrées catching up on each other’s lives. I told him about my small accounting firm, my marriage, my recent divorce.
“No children?”
I shook my head. The marriage had gone sour, the divorce had been a nightmare. I wanted off the subject.
“But enough about me,” I said. “What have you been up to?”
“Would you believe clinical psychology?”
“No,” I said, too shocked to lie. “I wouldn’t.”
The Jonathan Creighton I’d known had been so eccentric, so out of step, so self-absorbed, I couldn’t imagine him as a psychotherapist. Jonathan Creighton helping other people get their lives together—it was almost laughable.
He was the one laughing, however—good-naturedly, too.
“Yeah. It is hard to believe, but I went on to get a Master’s, and then a Ph.D. Actually went into practice.”
His voice trailed off.
“You’re using the past tense,” I said.
“Right. It didn’t work out. The practice never got off the ground. But the problem was really within myself. I was using a form of reality therapy but it never worked as it should. And finally I realized why: I don’t know—really know—what reality is. Nobody does.”
This had an all too familiar ring to it. I tried to lighten things up before they got too heavy.
“Didn’t someone once say that reality is what trips you up whenever you walk around with your eyes closed?”
Creighton’s smile showed a touch of the old condescension that so infuriated some people.
“Yes, I suppose someone would say something like that. Anyway, I decided to go off and see if I could find out what reality really was. Did a lot of traveling. Wound up in a place called Miskatonic University. Ever heard of it?”
“In Massachusetts, isn’t it?”
“That’s the one. In a small town called Arkham. I hooked up with the anthropology department there—that was my undergraduate major, after all. But now I’ve left academe to write a book.”
“A book?”
This was beginning to sound like a pretty disjointed life. But that shouldn’t have surprised me.
“What a deal!” he said, his eyes sparkling. “I’ve got grants from Rutgers, Princeton, the American Folklore Society, the N
ew Jersey Historical Society, and half a dozen others, just to write a book!”
“What’s it about?”
“The origins of folktales. I’m going to select a few and trace them back to their roots. That’s where you come in.”
“Oh?”
“I’m going to devote a significant chapter to the Jersey Devil.”
“There’ve been whole books written about the Jersey Devil. Why don’t you—“.
“I want real sources for this, Mac. Primary all the way. Nothing secondhand. This is going to be definitive.”
“What can I do for you?”
“You’re a Piney, aren’t you?”
Resentment flashed through me. Even though people nowadays described themselves as “Piney” with a certain amount of pride, and I’d even seen bumper stickers touting “Piney Power,” some of us still couldn’t help bristling when an outsider said it. When I was a kid it was always used as a pejorative. Like “clam-digger” here on the coast. Fighting words. Officially it referred to the multigenerational natives of the great Pine Barrens that ran south from Route 70 all the way down to the lower end of the state. I’ve always hated the term. To me it was the equivalent of calling someone a redneck.
Which, to be honest, wasn’t so far from the truth. The true Pineys are poor rural folk, often working truck farms and doing menial labor in the berry fields and cranberry bogs—a lot of them do indeed have red necks. Many are uneducated, or at best undereducated. Those who can afford wheels drive the prototypical battered pickup with the gun rack in the rear window. They even speak with an accent that sounds southern. They’re Jersey hillbillies. Country bumpkins in the very heart of the industrial Northeast. Anachronisms. Pineys.